2. Layoffs are the Weather now

Every round of cuts still gets reported like a surprise. A shock. A sign that something somewhere has gone wrong.

It hasn't. Nothing has gone wrong. This is the system working exactly as designed.

That's the part not many people want to say out loud.

So I will.

The numbers stopped being a blip a while ago

In 2026 the cuts didn't ease off. They accelerated. AI became the single most cited reason for job losses, with AI-linked cuts running to nearly 88,000 by mid-year, against roughly 55,000 for all of 2025 and under 13,000 the year before that. Tech got hit hardest, with reductions running at about three times the next worst sector.

Look at that line. Thirteen thousand. Fifty-five thousand. Eighty-eight thousand and still climbing. That isn't a wobble in the economy. That's a trend with an rocket engine bolted to it.

The layoffs.fyi tracker is agreat way to see what is going on in the tech industry, but the trend is across a wider set of industries than just tech.

There is a detail that unsettles ME more than the raw numbers. Plenty of the companies doing the cutting are profitable. They aren't trimming to survive. They're trimming to fund something else. Your salary stops being a cost of doing business and becomes capital they'd rather spend on the AI build. You weren't failing. You were just less interesting than a data centre.

The reason they give you is not the reason

This is where you need to keep your head.

AI has quietly become the acceptable story. Around 59% of companies now frame their cuts as AI-driven, in part because it lands well with shareholders. Analysts even have a name for it now. AI redundancy washing. Cuts that were really about over-hiring, soft revenue, or investor pressure, dressed up as a clean story about the future.

So on the day it lands, two things are true at once. AI really is eating certain roles. And AI is also the polite cover for decisions that have nothing to do with AI.

You'll know it isn't precision engineering because of what happens next. Roughly half the companies cutting jobs for AI are expected to rehire by 2027, once they discover the gains were oversold and the work still needs doing. They cut in a hurry. They backfill in shame. That is not a careful plan. That is a reflex.

So when the news comes, you'll sit there running the tape back, trying to find the thing you did wrong. Stop. The answer is almost always nothing.

This was always the deal. You just couldn't see it.

Here's an uncomfortable truth.

The contract was never loyalty for security. It was money for labour, for exactly as long as the labour made financial sense to the company. That was the deal the whole time. The lanyard, the offsites, the we're-a-family emails, that was decoration. Pleasant. Sometimes sincere. Never load-bearing.

You didn't notice because for a long tome the maths happened to favour keeping you. Now, for a lot of roles, it doesn't. Nothing moral changed but the spreadsheet did.

This is exactly why the old career playbook has fallen apart. The five-year plan assumed the ladder would still be there in five years. It won't be, and I've written before about why planning that far out is a fantasy now. The ground moves too fast to stand still on.

How to actually face this

You can't control the weather. You can decide how you dress for it.

Here are three shifts that help.

• Stop treating it as an emergency. An emergency is a one-off you respond to and recover from. Weather is a condition you plan around, permanently. Treat your career like you live somewhere it rains, because you do.
• Stop taking it personally. The decision was made in a room you weren't in, about a line item, not a person. Your worth and your role were never the same thing, even when it felt like they were.
• Start building the security they were never going to hand you. Skills that travel. A name people know outside the org chart. Relationships you own. A bit of runway. Optionality is the only safety there is now, and the wild part is that nobody can make you redundant from it.

The people who do worst in this are the ones who keep waiting for the old normal to come back. It isn't coming back. The sooner you stop scanning the horizon for it, the sooner you can start preparing for the climate you're actually in.

One thing to do this week

Open a blank note. Write down how many months you could survive with no income, today, if the email came tomorrow.

Don't fix anything yet. Just look at the number. That number is your real relationship with this new normal, and most people have never once worked it out.

Everything else in this series builds from there.

Try this prompt:

Act like a blunt but kind financial organiser. Here are my monthly outgoings, plus any income and savings: [paste]. 

Work out how many months I could cover with no income starting today. Then show me the three changes that would stretch that runway furthest, ranked from least painful to most. No lecture, just the number and the options.